Return to the Scene of the Crime

Jacobs’s return to a single scene from the 1905 short Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son – which he first disassembled in his 1969 masterpiece of the same name – could easily be titled ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Scene.’ An avant-gardist’s comedy, Return roguishly riffs on thirteen distinct styles, revealing, distorting, interpreting, and even misinterpreting the hundreds of actions in a single scene – as painting, abstraction, allegory, and, ultimately, as ballet. It’s a wry, roving, and joyous ode to movies, an experimental Enfants du paradis.
Even more than with Anaglyph Tom, this is archeological excavation from a very contemporary point of view. Just as the structural cinema from the late sixites could be read as a countermovement to mainstream cinema, Jacobs goes against the grain of America’s grand narrative and inserts political comments, such as the final confession of Alan Greenspan. Far from pure formalist obsessiveness, Jacobs’s radically unconventional visual essays are testimony of a radical, untamed spirit that is unrelentless in its quest for a pure, first degree visual experience. (www.theauteurs.com)